After being out of contact for over a year with Abit we recently made arrangements to meet and overclock at Abits facility in Freemont California. We wanted to show the cascade and LN2 cooling as well as break 5Ghz with the Quad core processor for those attending.
XtremeSystems member Philly_boy flew in a few hours before I left for the bay area and he was invited to attend as his timing could not have been more perfect to make the trip. I needed a co-pilot for the long haul as well as some help loading and unloading of the cascade.
We loaded up the triple stage cascade in the back of a Ford Mustang Shelby for an awesome trip to Abit at mach speed. Will it fit?Yes! it fits like a glove and did not budge one inch event with hard breaking.
At Abit they had a break room setup for us, there was plenty of power and arranged nicely to suite the occasion. Access to the area was great, we were able to roll the LN2 bottle inside for a day of benching.
The first half of the day I ran on the cascade, everything ran perfect with the exception of the vcore mod not working as intended. Adjustments to the trimmer resulted in no gain. I was able to break 5Ghz and ran some benches at 4.9Ghz.
We had a chance to test setup and test on the IN9 board that is based on the Nvidia 680i chipset and has a digital PWM. This was not board we were focused on but a nice change of pace to see something new.
The Kinston ram arrived a bit late to give it a good workout and watch for errors. I was not able to run it at full speed as I was shooting for lowest latency. I ran the ram at 3-3-3-9 @ 800/900Mhz for the benchmarks, 2.4v was set in bios for ram voltage. The modules were ES and only had suggested voltage, there was no timing present on the sticker. The heat spreader was standard aluminum.
After lunch I switched over to LN2 and the new K|ngp|n Dragonpot. We were all blown away by the impressive new design. Check out the pictures below, the base is sold copper and has a meaty center pin for better heat dissipation. This is by far the best pot on the market today. I was using a bottom fed dewer and copper lines to feed directly into the pots. I could adjust the valve to any temp I desired. I could run a low steady -120c, bump it up to -150c and hold it, or even go full on and hit -197c in an instant.
Far better temp control than the cascade is capable of doing as well as temps far beyond what is capable with conventional cascade refrigeration cooling. I was very impressed with how well the pots could maintain a temp.
Abit is listening and responding to the needs of the enthusiasts, we put a few ideas on the table of things we would like to see that would help negate the high costs involved with high end benching. Lower cost enthusiast boards may be the next step, removing the unused stuff we usually disable anyway. Get back to the basic stuff to get costs way down will also suite other markets as well. Abit knows to use high quality components and it shows in the products ability to produce some of the highest benchmarks to date for its class of machine. I don’t want to see this change, its what makes Abit a great choice.
One thing I did learn last week was its not called U-GURU, its MicroGuru.
Abit, Intel and Kingston sponsored the demonstration, many thanks to the sponsors for having us. I am very happy that everything went a good as it did on short notice.
Uploading pictures in progress.
